A lot of good replies. I'm not as optimistic as some that FCP X will ever become a universal solution, unless some inherent design issues are resolved. It is however tantalizingly close for a lot of projects and really has both strong "offline" and "online" edit system features.
For example, on one project I'm cutting, that will rely heavily on speed ramps, I plan to use it for the "online system" (without the client) because of the quality of the optical flow, but I'll do the rough cut with FCP 7, because it's better suited on this job. On another, I would love to use it because the show uses heavy chromakey and it's just better and faster in X. Unfortunately it's a clean-up and conform of a piece the client built himself in FCP 7 and the track lay-out and design would be very hard to transfer to X without a complete rethink of the creative. In fact, the nature of the second project is sufficiently involved, that no translation into another NLE would be successful. So I'm stuck doing the clean-up in FCP 7 and hope that I can handle the creative cut on the next show, where I have some control of the tools.
My point is that these issues tend to point to FCP X as being A good tool (among many) in the arsenal, but maybe not THE tool. That's why I started from the standpoint of the branding. This tends to lead me to believe that we'll be seeing more FCP X / Adobe CS combo jobs in the future.
Ironically I did a convention edit the other night and it was the kind of job that would have been a good one for FCP X. There were about 7 editors on this. All running FCP 7. When I suggested to them that X might actually be a good tool on this job, I got a lot of dirty looks, along with being accused of hastening the downfall of paid editors everywhere ;-)
- Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com
